A Public Service Announcement, etc.

My hand is still in sort of a bad way, though it's getting better. I'm being careful, thank you for your concerned comments.

The Public Service Announcement:
If you don't read Rollertrain, you should. She works for a company that makes porn, so there's some writng about the sex industry - I'm telling you that because there seems to be a rule in blogging that people need to warned if a linked site has anything to do with sex. Most of her entries are not about sex, though. She writes well, beautifully and movingly about her life. Start with this, most recent and quite wonderful, entry.

The Tangent:
One of the panels I attended at BlogHer was about sex blogging. One of the questions discussed was (to paraphrase), "Why don't most people talk about their sex lives in their blogs?" It was a really interesting discussion - unfortunately the podcast isn't up yet, I'll keep and eye on the BlogHer site and let you know when it is.

Food for thought, it was. As enthusiastic as I am about my sex life, it would feel weird and forced to talk about it here... perhaps if I were a more frequent blogger, and discussed more of my life here, it would seem more natural. For better or worse, I guess that's not the kind of blog this is. It's not much of a knitting blog, really, though that's where it starts. I guess it's what I need it to be, which keeps changing. I'm glad that there are people who read it.

Edited to add: A salient point of this discussion was about the shame surrounding sex, especially for women. This was a point that really resonated with me, and a lot of the work I did about sex when I was in college (see below) was concerned with this issue. The panelists were discussing how the separation between our sex lives and our "real lives" was absurd and artificial, and contributed to harmful ideas about sex... of course I'm paraphrasing here and it's a much more involved discussion than I'm prepared to get into right now. This, however, is the idea that's been rolling around in my head as I have thought about this issue since the conference.

Steph's comment, however, brings it back to reality. Although I do agree with many of the points that were made by the panelists, for many of us it is not a good practical choice to discuss our sex lives on our blogs. (I hear you saying "Duh!") Yeah, I know that. It's not a good choice for me, either. I really shouldn't have left it unsaid.

When I was in art college, a lot of the work I did was about sex and sexuality, on both personal and political/societal levels. I've often thought that I'd like to do more work on these themes, and there are some books I'd like to write. Attending this session made me realize just how much I really haven't been working on, and researching for, these "some-day" projects. Reading Susie Bright's and Melissa Gira's blogs has reminded me of just how much more articulate, well-read and -informed I'll need to be if I want to start saying anything about anything. I'm out of practice, out of the loop.

So what am I going to do about it? For now, I can't distract myself from the other things I'm working out in my life - work, money, health, you know. But I need to be mindful of the goals and dreams I'm deferring til later (writing about sex isn't the only one). I need to be sure that when I say I'm working on an aspect of my life, I'm really working on it, instead of hiding behind my incompetence and using it as an excuse to avoid something else.